THE UPPER SCHOOL SYMPOSIUM
SOUND AND VISIONS
Kamil Aftyka (Year 13) reports on another stimulating day of ideas and discussion, which this year took ‘sound’ as its theme
H alfway through the Michaelmas term, the Upper School, accompanied by The Charter School Sixth-Form, were buzzing with excitement when we heard about this year’s Symposium theme, ‘Sound’, and we very much resonated with the bustling arrangement of seminars and lectures in store for us. The Symposium aims to emulate what university or, in more general terms, academia is about: discussing and challenging opinions and learning to be poised to tackle all sorts of cognitive dissonances in a rational way. This year was no exception. The day commenced with keynote speakers’ lectures in the Great Hall. Paul Weir explained why post-production sound design is such an exciting and creative career and Gareth Fry showed us that sound perception can be affected by the signals coming from other senses as well as our memory. Mr Fry wowed the audience with sound experiments to prove that our brains are very easily misled. Following this, every student attended two out of 28 seminars prepared by students, teachers and outside speakers, including journalist Miranda Sawyer, which provided much food for thought for many of my peers and me. We were taken on a whirlwind of sonic pathways, from discovering how movie soundtracks can have a decisive impact on our perception of a whole film, to pondering the question ‘Can the voices of the masses ever truly be heard?’, as Odunayo Oladuji’s (Year 13) seminar asked. Indeed, sounds are everywhere, in many different forms. You may think of the tweeting of birds in a local park as a typical example, but sounds are all-encompassing, emanating through tropical jungles on the other side of the planet
and dominating military battles. Perhaps Samuel Beckett just wanted a break when he communicated with an audience through compression and silence (or an incomprehensible stream of words which cannot be heard), as Mr Fisher’s talk explored. After lunch, we explored the more spontaneous nature of sound; the whole afternoon event was a creative improvisation exercise which explored Music in a sense- dazzling collaborative workshop run by Mr Ingram and Mark Armstrong, a jazz trumpeter. But the workshop was not only about music – it was enriched by stunning visual effects prepared by Art students, and impressed all who attended, as was revealed by feedback and a question and answer session afterwards. The peroration of the day brought the theme right to its core, with Symposium Plus. In the Masters’ Library, we were offered a chance to talk less formally with the keynote speakers in a more relaxed atmosphere and really get to the heart of the issues that we’d come across throughout the day. While initially I thought this section may attract only the boys whose lives were already dominated by music, I found a variety of boys with different interests eager to further their discussion, seemingly inspired by the diverse seminars on offer earlier in the day, which ranged from ‘The Neuroscience of Sound’ to ‘The Silence of God’. In all, the Symposium struck a fine chord, both encouraging stimulating conversation, which prepares boys for the independent thinking of university, while remaining grounded and genuinely interesting for all who took part. You could say it generated a lot of noise…
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